Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 095
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform account from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), among the oldest written documents on earth. It tallies a very large amount of barley — recorded in the archaic capacity system with its big round and small punched number signs — together with fragmentary entries mentioning young goats, a storage mound, and beer. The closing sign GU7, 'consumed,' marks the grain as issued out as rations or fodder rather than held in store. This is bookkeeping written before there was grammar on clay: nouns, numbers, and a verb of disbursement, nothing more.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first lines, broken, mention goats and a storage mound with beer. Then comes the main figure: a large measured quantity of barley, written out in the archaic capacity units — one big measure, five tens, three units, and a string of smaller fractional grain notations. The reverse carries a second set of figures (seven, five, and one in different units), and the account closes with a single word: consumed. In other words, this grain was drawn down and issued out, not left in the granary.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1. [...] kid(s)/young goat(s) [...] 2. [...] storage-heap; beer 3. 1(N45) 5(N14) 3(N01) 3(N39~a) 1(N24) 1(N29~a) 1(N30~c) — barley (reverse) 4. 7(N19) 5(N04) 1(N29~b) 5. consumed (rations disbursed)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] , MASZ2 [...] [...] , DU6~a KASZ~b 1(N45) 5(N14) 3(N01) 3(N39~a) 1(N24) 1(N29~a) 1(N30~c) , SZE~a 7(N19) 5(N04) 1(N29~b) GU7
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 095. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325737) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.